Dreamforce 2013 NotebookNovember 22, 2013
There's always a lot to digest after Salesforce.com's annual bacchanalia, Dreamforce, which drew 135,000 registrants this year. Some of it is about Salesforce's announcements, but a lot more of it is about the implications of those announcements, the people who attend, and what goes on around the show. Despite its peculiar name, Salesforce1 is an important step for Salesforce.

Pivotal Delivers on PromisesNovember 22, 2013
A bit more than six months ago, EMC and VMware celebrated the launch of Pivotal, a new company led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz. Pivotal's team included IP and personnel from EMC's Greenplum and Pivotal Labs organizations, and VMware's vFabric, Cloud Foundry and Cetas organizations. A considerable surprise was the support from General Electric, including $105 million for a 10 percent stake.

The Simmering Devops DebateNovember 18, 2013
When open source software was still getting established in the enterprise five years ago or so, there was a lot of discussion about so-called open core ripoffs. The concern was that anyone and everyone was proclaiming an association with open source software, even if most or all of their products were proprietary. Today, a similar debate has arisen about devops.

9 Ways to Stay Up and Running on Cyber MondayNovember 16, 2013
The holiday shopping season is right around the corner, and that means e-commerce companies are now in the midst of the great run-up to the holidays -- an all-out sprint to get every possible new feature, bug fix and version tested and released in time for the big crush. This year, the stakes have been raised even higher with one less week between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The Latest Big Blue Sea ChangeNovember 05, 2013
IBM's recent Enterprise 2013 conference in Orlando, Fla., was the Systems and Technology Group's inaugural event focusing on high-end business solutions. So it was no surprise that the CIOs, partners and IT practitioners -- data center admins and managers -- who work with IBM's System z mainframe and Power Systems platforms were thick on the ground.

HGST's New Hard-Drive Isn't Full of Hot AirNovember 04, 2013
Western Digital subsidiary HGST has found a novel way of packing more storage capacity into a standard 3.5-inch hard disc drive: filling it with helium instead of air. The 6-TB Ultrastar He6 HDD is the highest-capacity drive in the world, according to the company. HGST has achieved this by packing seven disk platters into the drive instead of the standard five.

NIST Forges Ahead With Critical Infrastructure Security PlanOctober 23, 2013
The National Institute of Standards and Technology on Wednesday released a preliminary cybersecurity framework for improving the cybersecurity of the United States' critical infrastructure. The Institute will soon open a 45-day public comment period on the framework, seeking input from reviewers on a series of questions. The dates will be announced in the Federal Register.

Revisiting Risk Assessment in the CloudOctober 01, 2013
The case for cloud is compelling for a number of reasons, but one of the more compelling reasons from a technologist's point of view has to do with the ability to abstract lower levels of the application stack. Depending on the model of cloud employed, varying amounts of the underlying technology components move out of the scope of your direct control.

IDF2013: Intel's Evolution Hugs the Inside TrackSeptember 30, 2013
Silicon Valley loves an underdog. That's partly because such tales feed the industry's self-mythologizing and the IPO culture that attracts fresh money. To be honest, IT can boast more than its fair share of such successes: Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak, and Page and Brin all helped make the industry what it is today. However, mythic underdogs also serve as distractions from another truth.

Oracle Plays Catch-Up With In-Memory Database CapabilitiesSeptember 24, 2013
Oracle on Monday announced an in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c that will accelerate analytics, data warehousing, reporting, and online transaction processing for Oracle in-memory applications that "deliver extreme performance on Oracle Engineered Systems," according to the company. "This is a story about Oracle being a bit late to the game," said Infostructure Associates' Wayne Kernochan.

A Satellite's-Eye View on Mobile PaymentsSeptember 17, 2013
Turn-by-turn directions have become a common technological enhancement to the automotive world thanks to a set of satellites dedicated to the task. To date, these radio positioning signals have been supplied to consumers primarily by the U.S. military through a satellite constellation called "GPS," or Global Positioning System. Essentially, receivers on the ground interpret the signals and tell you where you are.

Open Source Is Woven Into the Latest, Hottest TrendsSeptember 12, 2013
We may not see or hear much about open source in the latest cloud or Big Data offerings, but it's playing a significant role in the most disruptive trends in enterprise IT. Just as we've seen with open source in cloud computing, it is an integral part of trends that currently are disrupting consumer and enterprise IT markets, including hybrid cloud computing, automation and devops, and Big Data.

VCE's Digital Factory VisionSeptember 11, 2013
Technology has always enabled the "factorification" of processes and skills for both users and suppliers of IT. The success of early computing solutions rested in replacing hundreds and thousands of Bob Cratchett-like professionals with systems that required few, if any, sick days and no vacations. Then businesses discovered they needed to hire hundreds or thousands of technical gurus.

PayPal Lights Beacon for Hands-Free PaymentsSeptember 10, 2013
PayPal on Monday announced new technology that aims to make paying for goods as simple as walking into a store. Specifically, PayPal Beacon is a contactless payment system that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect with customer handsets to send offers and complete transactions. The mobile wallet-like payment system lets consumers pay for purchases hands-free.

Amazon Dips Its Toe Into the Brisk WiFi WatersAugust 26, 2013
Amazon has run tests on WiFi technology that could give Kindle users direct Internet connectivity, according to a recent report. The technology uses spectrum controlled by satellite communications company Globalstar, which is perhaps best known as a global satellite phone service provider. It is possible that the tests were part of a series conducted jointly by Globalstar and Jarvinian.

Facebook Aims to 'Friend' the World - With BenefitsAugust 21, 2013
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday launched Internet.org, a project with a goal no less lofty than to provide Internet access to everyone on the planet. With other founding members including Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung, the project aims to develop joint projects, share knowledge, and mobilize industry and governments to bring the world online.

Groklaw Shutters Doors Over Email Privacy ConcernsAugust 20, 2013
The continuing flood of news about the NSA's surveillance of Americans' communications, which has already forced secure email providers Lavabit and Silent Circle to shut down, has now claimed yet another victim. Specifically, award-winning tech legal news site Groklaw, which served the free and open source software community, on Tuesday announced that it is closing because of email security concerns.

IBM, Google, Nvidia and Pals Launch OpenPowerAugust 19, 2013
In parsing any announcement, it's good to keep an eye on 1) what is being done; 2) who is involved; and 3) how and why the world will be different if they succeed. In the case of the OpenPower Consortium, the effort is grounded in IBM's decision to make its Power microprocessor architecture and related technologies fully available to partners and customers.

Dismal Quarter Sheds No Light on Dell's Murky FutureAugust 16, 2013
Dell posted its Q2 earnings report Thursday, reporting a 72 percent drop in net income. The report comes in the throes of a long-running battle for Dell's future. Founder and CEO Michael Dell is leading an effort to take the company private through a $25 billion deal, but activist shareholder Carl Icahn has come out strongly against it, suggesting an alternate plan.

Putting Enterprise Risk Under the MicroscopeJuly 29, 2013
Recent developments in the cybersecurity landscape have heightened interest in accurately anticipating and understanding risk, and using that knowledge to better manage organizations. Enterprises are better delivering risk assessment and, one hopes, defenses, in the current climate of challenging cybersecurity. Nation-state types of threats may have a very serious impact on organizations.

IBM's Smart CSL BuyJuly 19, 2013
Over the past three-plus decades, it is hard to think of a business computing-related technology that's driven more fundamental value than virtualization, and it's for a very simple reason: Since hardware evolves at a far faster pace than software, systems tend to deliver far more performance than needed, meaning they are drastically underutilized.

SolePower: Stepping Away From the GridJuly 12, 2013
Here's a charging method that could make a lot of sense. It's one that isn't reliant on the sun to convert solar radiation into power; it also isn't reliant on heavy batteries for its mojo. Instead, SolePower's Kickstarter project aims to generate power kinetically with each step you take. That's via a shoe insert, specifically, and it uses the same principle as a hand-crank flashlight.

France Nixes '3 Strikes' Law for Copyright InfringersJuly 10, 2013
France has abandoned a law that called for copyright infringers' Internet connections to be cut off upon a third offense. The law stipulated that letters be sent the first and second time people illicitly downloaded copyrighted material; the third time around, an offender's Web access would be disconnected. The change of heart reflects a shift in focus, according to a French spokesperson.